Employee Free Choice: Who's Fighting

Big business poured tens of millions of dollars into campaigning against Democratic Senate candidates because they might support the Employee Free Choice Act. Now that Jeanne Shaheen, Mark Udall, and Jeff Merkley have been elected, what does the campaign against Employee Free Choice look like?

Apparently, like a full employment act for Republican operatives:

Both business and labor are dispatching hordes of supporters to lobby Congress this week. And already, the battle has provided a welcome stimulus to a seriously depressed industry: Republican political operatives.

"There are groups springing up almost every week," said Rhonda Betz of Navigators Global, a consulting firm that started the first anti-EFCA group out of the gate, Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, in 2006. "Some of it is a reflection of them identifying this as a fundraising opportunity, and some of it is a reflection of real stuff going on."

Fighting the bill "employs a whole lot of people in town," conceded another anti-EFCA official. "Only lobbyists could cook something up like this."

That there are groups springing up almost every week is no joke -- depending how you count the dizzying proliferation of parent and spin-off groups mentioned, there are up to a dozen anti-Employee Free Choice Act groups named in this article alone. A small flavor:

Another business-backed group, the Workforce Fairness Institute (not to be confused with the Workforce Freedom Initiative), employs Former Bush ad man Mark McKinnon, former White House Political Director Sara Taylor, Mitt Romney aides Barbara Comstock and Katie Packer, powerhouse conservative PR firm CRC, GOP Web gurus Patrick Ruffini, Mindy Finn and Patrick Hynes and former RNC Communications Director Diaz.

The deep-pocketed Chamber of Commerce — which represents the CEOs of giants like IBM, Pepsi, and UPS — and the National Federation of Independent Business are both fighting the legislation.

The groups are, once again putting tens of millions of dollars into the battle against...what? Into the battle against letting working people choose not just whether to join a union but how to do it. Their money and their armies of lobbyists and astroturfers are dedicated to fear-mongering and misleading, because it's the only thing they know how to do.

The Employee Free Choice Act will be a step forward for workplace democracy. That's the last thing the likes of Wal-Mart and the Chamber of Commerce want to see happen.